Happy Tuesday, friends! Today we are gonna talk about the former Emo Kings of Myspace in 2005…Mayday Parade, of course! This band has been a pop punk and emo staple of the last 20 years and are continuing to release new music today. Let’s get in to it 🙂
A Brief History of Mayday Parade
Mayday Parade was formed in Tallahassee, Florida in 2005 when two struggling punk bands decided to team up and join forces to try to make it big. Jeremy Lenzo, Brooks Betts, and Derek Saunders of Defining Moment decided to merge with Kid Named Chicago’s Jason Lancaster, Alex Garcia, and Jake Bundrik. Together, pooling their resources, the band relocated to Georgia to record their first EP, Tales Told by Dead Friends in June 2006, and picked the name, “Mayday Parade,” for their band as the album was recorded in the first week of May.
For a self-released album, TTBDF was extremely well received and popular, even landing the band a spot on the Vans Warped Tour in 2006, where the band members would hand out their record to anyone and everyone who would listen.
The publicity from Warped Tour helped the band earn accolades not only in real life, but on the Mecca of hot new music at the time, Myspace! Loads of teens showcased Mayday Parade’s music on their profiles as badges of honor, and this social media hype compared with skyrocketing sales caught the eyes of Fearless Records, who went on to sign the band and have them record their first full-length album, A Lesson In Romantics in 2007. It was after this album’s recording that Lancaster decided to leave the band and pursue a solo career. However, the album was a major success, going gold in the United States and cementing Mayday Parade as a staple in the emo genre that was booming at the time.
The band went on to release 2009’s Anywhere But Here and self-titled Mayday Parade in 2011 in absence of their former main songwriter and vocalist, nevertheless proving to be prolific songwriters and music makers all together, with both albums charting high on the Billboard 200. 2013’s Monsters in the Closet also went on to be the band’s most successful album to date, keeping the band’s signature sound at a time that other bands in the scene went on to lean in to the pop side of pop-punk or go into rock opera like My Chemical Romance.
In 2015, Mayday Parade released Black Lines. This album, while still commercially successful, marked a shift in the band’s popularity as the former building blocks of their rise to fame, Myspace and the Vans Warped Tour, were not nearly the music mainstays they once were a decade prior. By 2018 to 2021, the release of Sunnyland (2018) and What it Means to Fall Apart (2021) demonstrated that while the band’s music continued, like usual, to receive glowing reviews from critics, it was far less commercially successful as it was in the past as the band’s sound stayed overwhelmingly consistent even amidst emo’s evolved resurgence in the early 2020s. While some fans of the band (and music in general) adore that the band has stayed very true to the sound that fans knew and loved since the beginning, others wanted the band to evolve more with the times. Nevertheless, you have to truly appreciate how much Mayday Parade has done for the genre, staying true to their sound and capturing the nostalgia everyone loves to this day!
Mayday Parade in Pop Culture
While Mayday Parade has made its mark in pop culture featuring their music on television shows such as Lily Darling (2022) Kids in Love (2010) and Made in Chelsea (2011), even performing for the popular series Punk Goes Pop , we are going to talk about the band’s most widely recognized track that for many people, was the entire summer of 2008…”Jamie all Over!”
For so many (myself included), “Jamie All Over” is one of the best songs in the entire pop punk genre. The song has an infectious melody and captures the mood us elder emos felt at the time of its release as adolescents who wanted to run away and start a new life, portraying vivid imagery of making it big in the flashy city of Las Vegas and kissing our loves on the beach. Not to mention, social media was on the rise at the time, and there weren’t many songs quite like “Jamie All Over” that we had plastered all over our myspace profiles that we used at the time as a staple to not only share new music, but to connect with those we cherished.
“Jamie All Over” is eternally one of the most beloved and classic emo songs not only because it exploded in popularity during the emo boom of the 2000s, but because it blew up as part of that pivotal time in pop culture where people were both heavily connected in person at concerts and online via social media, a time when possibilities seemed endless with technology and a time where elder emos like myself were growing up, dreaming big dreams and trying to find ourselves, and this song spoke to those things in us in ways that few others could.
Whether you’re new to emo and pop punk or just starting out with the genres, I highly recommend giving Mayday Parade a listen if you want to hear that classic sound that made emo rise to fame in the early 2000s with a band that has stayed consistent to its signature style and with a loyal fanbase for twenty years and counting. Check out their discography here!
Till Next Time!
XOXO,
Meagan